Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

The following events unfolded in just under eleven minutes.

Dr. Nidhi Vedala was awoken in her hammock by a bloodcurdling shriek. Later, it was determined that the scream came from a Matis porter who had been impaled through the upper chest with a sharpened bamboo spear. Perhaps having heard a noise, the man had apparently gone to the camp perimeter and illuminated his headlamp.

Inhuman roars, jaguar-like, resounded in the jungle for the next thirty seconds as the frightened team of scientists flipped out of their hammocks and into the dirt, blinking sleep from their eyes. Confusion ensued as the scientists and porters attempted to scramble to safety under a hail of bamboo-tipped arrows that fluttered into the campsite from all directions.

Sergeant Brink had wisely placed his rugged frontiersmen in a perimeter around the less experienced scientists—both to keep the newcomers protected from prowling animals and to prevent them from simply wandering into the woods and getting lost. The nearly defenseless scientists strategically occupied the center of the camp, their hammocks radiating from the shared base of a walking palm tree.

The Matis were first to face the danger while the scientists fumbled into partial shelter among the walking palms’ thick, stiltlike roots. Dozens of arrows were raining down around them, their needle-sharp tips coated with a poisonous curare plant extract normally used for hunting monkeys.

After the first few volleys, Brink’s voice could be heard barking out hoarse commands. In moments, the small clearing around the great walking palm tree erupted into a cacophony of gunfire. The sharp smell of gunpowder and the pungent aroma of shredded bark and leaves filled the camp. The piercing crack of rifle shots and booming shotgun blasts reverberated almost nonstop for several deafening minutes.

All of this noise was punctuated by the stuttering discharge of Brink’s snub-nosed M4A1 battle rifle. The lethal black weapon was lighter than standard-issue and outfitted with a Mark 18 close quarters battle receiver (CQBR)—a 10.3-inch barrel appropriate for the close-up nature of jungle warfare, a favorite among special forces units.

As he crawled on hands and knees through the flickering light of muzzle blasts, Stone caught glimpses of the demonic, twisted red faces of devils. The monsters were scampering through the brush along the perimeter of the camp with long black axes held high. Remembering the smudge of red in his drone footage, Stone could now confirm it had not been a visual artifact.

This was first contact.

Faces smeared in red urucum paint, the devilish-looking warriors were in reality only men, small and agile, chests tattooed in solid black bars and hair coated with tufts of bird down. They were emissaries from an uncontacted tribe, and almost certainly the group who had been following and watching the scientists’ journey. They had warned the field team in myriad ways to go no farther into forbidden territory.

Now it was too late.

On examination of documented sightings registered by FUNAI in the preceding year, this group matched closely with a tribe known colloquially as the Machado—named for their use of rare stone axes . Having retreated to the Amazonian interior only a generation ago, this group would certainly have retained extensive knowledge of guns and their capabilities. This explains how they knew to use the trees as cover to avoid weapons that barked and spat bullets into the night.

The Matis, who had until recently been in the same situation as their attackers, seemed to immediately recognize the indigenous tactics. They well understood the lethal stakes of this fight. Each of the Matis fired his weapon wildly into the jungle, emptying magazines and ejecting spent shells, filling the air with the rolling thunder of explosions.

It was an impressive show of force, and that was the point.

Sergeant Brink had been surprised to his core by the brazen attack. But his disbelief and fear intensified as the fighting continued beyond the initial barrage of gunfire. The noise and destruction were expressly meant to shock the enemy into retreat. Even having seen only glimpses of these ferocious warriors, Brink suspected that something was seriously wrong with them. Intertribal warfare in the deep Amazon was not unheard of, but attacks on Westerners were rare and almost never continued past an initial demonstration of overwhelming firepower.

Worse, Brink understood that his command over the Matis scouts was tenuous at best. And as he watched in dismay—shouting desperate orders over the whip-crack reports of his own battle rifle—Brink’s worst fears came true.

One by one, the guns went silent.

After his initial scream, the wounded Matis had quickly collapsed. His nervous system had been invaded by sticky black curare, a naturally occurring neurotoxin primarily employed to paralyze large primates during hunting expeditions. His body lay inert, the LED headlamp on his forehead still illuminating a bright slice of jungle floor. Meanwhile, in an act of silent cooperation, the rest of the Matis guides had quietly retreated together.

Brink’s harshly shouted orders and threats had no effect except to further frighten the scientists still huddled among the roots of the walking palm.

Continuing to risk life and limb on an inscrutable mission for outsiders would have made no sense to the indigenous mercenaries. Having been exploited for decades by various visitors to the Amazon, the Matis had much more in common with the Machado than with Sergeant Brink or the Wildfire field team.

The guides, many of whom were related, would have been secure in the knowledge that in only a few days’ hike they could reach the ancestral maloca huts of their families in the deep jungle. In addition, a deep-seated (and well-earned) distrust of whites had left them suspecting that this mess had been caused by foreigners of one sort or another. Better to withdraw and let the situation take care of itself.

Within six minutes of the attack, every non-native member of the Wildfire team had been left to fend for himself.

Only Eduardo Brink was armed and capable of defending the camp. As the confident soldier stalked through the pitch-black jungle, he would have known that if he were to even be nicked by a poisonous spear point, the entire science team would likely be slaughtered.

“Lights out!” Brink shouted.

James Stone had turned on a flashlight in the center of the camp. The light only made him a target. Plus, it would interfere with Brink’s last-ditch plan of attack. The camp was quickly enclosed in darkness again.

Brink crouched and wedged the butt of his battle rifle into the hollow of his shoulder, pressing his cheek against the cold metal. With a dirt-covered thumb, he flipped on the green-glowing AN/PVS-17 night sight. Normally, his night vision would be helmet-mounted, but this was supposedly a civilian operation, and his orders had been to keep the military hardware to a minimum.

Scanning the walking palm tree in the amplified light of the rifle scope, Brink was glad to see the scientists staying together in the folds of bark. In addition, some enterprising individual had dragged over a few pieces of hard-case luggage to provide cover from stray arrows.

Brink swept his night sight across the face of the open jungle, the glow tracing a green circle over his right eye.

He began to discern the silhouettes of his attackers as they loped between the black stripes of trees. The sight of them was grotesque—the features he could make out were caked in gritty layers of red paint that appeared black in his sight. Beneath the mud, he could see cheeks, lips, and eyes that were twisted and deformed. The surface of their skin seemed to be erupting in gruesome dark splotches.